President of Cricket West Indies (CWI), Ricky Skerritt has stated that CARICOM will have a larger role to play in the affairs of cricket in the region.
Speaking at a press conference at CWI Headquarters in Antigua, Skerritt was responding to questions posed by Stabroek Sport, relating to the involvement of CARICOM in West Indies Cricket.
He responded by asserting that the body was a stakeholder in cricket.
Equally important, he said were the individual members of CARICOM as individual stakeholders.
“CWI will be paying greater attention to the recommendations, comments and opinions and the opportunity of investing resources into the needs of cricket.
“The partnerships with Ministry of Sports across the region will be crucial to the future of grassroots cricket and other areas of investment in cricket development,” he added.
Skerritt, a former Rhodes Scholar, explained that it will become the norm for himself along with vice-president, Dr. Kishore Shallow as well as other directors and key executive officers, to touch base with the various Ministries of Sport from every level possible to make sure the partnerships between the parties are strengthened for cricket development.
Skerritt reiterated his position from the campaign trail where he admitted to not having illusions about the need for partnerships but accepted that in the past, there were some areas of difference.
“It is now about how quickly and in what direction CWI can improve its corporate governance,” he said while adding that the body “has already began to take some important steps in that direction.”
Skerritt justified his position on the relationship among stakeholders by revealing that Jamaica business executive and chairman of Grace Kennedy, Senator Don Wehby had committed to taking up the leadership of a task force “to do some internal work before making presentations to stakeholders and consulting with all parties including CARICOM.”
The CWI president, who was a CWI director in the past, nominated by CARICOM to take up the seat at the table, also acknowledged that there has already been a leading member of staff who will be focused on helping Wehby move the process forward.
In the past, the relationship between CWI and CARICOM has been described as “strained.”
A CARICOM-commissioned Governance Review Report in 2014 criticised CWI for
having an “obsolete governance framework” which did not “prioritise accountability and transparency”, and recommended “immediate dissolution” of the board. In pushing back on CARICOM’s intervention, CWI has argued that as a private entity, governments did not have the right to determine its operations.
Chairman of CARICOM’s subcommittee on Cricket, Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves, who had met with the International Cricket Council’s chief executive, Dave Richardson, said the ICC had agreed on the need for normal relationships between the board and the regional governments.
“They agree also that you can’t have a board being in a hostile relationship with governments or several of the governments. That doesn’t make any sense and that is not good for cricket generally,” said Gonsalves.
“He (Richardson) was appreciative of what we are trying to do and appreciative of the fact that we are not going to undermine the ICC statutes about the independence of management from any political direction or control,” he added.
